Worksite Wellness: Are We Having The Impact We Desire?

Making an impact requires us to have clarity of purpose

The beginning of a New Year is an ideal time to take stock of the impact of your worksite wellness program is having on both the organization and its participating employees. Assessing your impact is critical for three key reasons:

 

In recent years, Drs. Michael O’Donnell (PhD) and Ron Goetzel (PhD) have raised significant issues regarding program impact. Here is what they said or wrote:
 

In addition to the concerns of these two worksite wellness leaders and researchers, recent research studies and program evaluation studies have also cast doubt on the impact of worksite wellness programs. As recent as January 2018, the researchers of a random control designed worksite wellness program at the University of Illinois Urbana – Champaign reported in their findings that they found no evidence of impact in their first year’s results.

They wrote this, even though they are still evaluating their first year results around employee biometrics. They must, therefore, be pretty confident in their results. (3)

If we are not having an impact, then what should we, as worksite wellness practitioners, do? Continuing to do more of the same does not seem to make much sense here. Continuing to do more of the same sounds, to me, like Einstein’s definition of insanity. A definition we have all read or heard before.

Making an impact requires us to have clarity of purpose. There needs to be clarity around our why. Why are we creating the worksite wellness program? Why are we offering a worksite wellness program to employees? The why may be singular, or the why may involve multiple purposes. In either case, our why must be clearly articulated across the whole organization. Everyone should know and be able to state why the worksite wellness program exists.

Within our purpose, we need to be authentic. We need to be able to clearly articulate what the worksite wellness program will accomplish and not accomplish. And more importantly, we need to be in a position to be able to prove it when and if asked.

Making an impact requires alignment. There needs to be alignment between the worksite wellness program and the rest of the organization. This includes the organization’s purpose, mission, vision, values, beliefs and plans. In other words, there needs to be integration. Everyone needs to know how all the pieces fit together in a common purpose.

There also needs to be alignment between the worksite wellness program and employee needs, wants and desires. Employees need to see how what they are being offered will enhance their life or solve an immediate pain point or problem.

In terms of alignment, there also needs to be alignment between the program’s purpose and the programming and interventions delivered through the program. What is offered needs to address your stated purpose. Otherwise, how will you achieve your purpose?

Finally, in order to know you are having an impact, you need to monitor, measure and evaluate. Otherwise, how do you know you are making any progress towards achieving your purpose? The metrics you use need to reflect the program’s purpose. Monitoring, measuring and evaluation do not have to be hard or difficult. Between different quantitative and qualitative types of evaluation methods, there are many the worksite wellness practitioner can employ without the help of an outside researcher or program evaluator.

As a worksite wellness practitioner, you should ask and answer these three questions for yourself:
 

Beat the impact odds. Have clarity of purpose, be authentic, align everything you do and monitor, measure and evaluate. As worksite wellness practitioners, we can and should be making a difference. And, be able to prove or demonstrate that we are.

References